Hi All,
Adoptions of the Blueprint OER College Success texts continue to spread and I am proud to have contributed to addressing textbook affordability and quality learning material for many students all over the United States. I also applaud your initiative, courage, and willingness to try something new that is a making positive impact for our students.
Version Update:
The Cultural Competency Chapter (only in the main College and Career text) is still a work in progress (as are the texts themselves) but is complete and available in the web version of the main text at the end of Unit 8. My original plan was to give the Cultural Competency Chapter an official number at the end of June, but in order to better accommodate some summer sections, I am now planning on making the change this week. The Cultural Competency Chapter will become Chapter 48 and the previous Chapters 48-61 will shift to 49-62. When this is complete the new version will be 1.3 (again only for the main text) and the new link for the print version from lulu.com will be available in the google drive ancillary folder. I apologize for any challenges this may cause and will not plan on making changes that shift chapters very often.
Google Drive Ancillary Folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jkwHgNDRLeAmVCJdcwlF48eONBPdxzQ9
Recency and revision:
It is my goal in the next year to review the resources, citations, links, videos, etc. and strive to keep a five year recency with the information in the texts. This may be a project I take on with my students and would be happy to have others participate in this as well (please let me know if you are interested).
Collaboration Opportunities:
If anyone has interest in collaborating, interning, etc., please let me know.
Tracking Adoptions:
One of the challenges with OER is being able to track adoptions and adaptions. With no purchases or royalties, it is easy for adoptions to happen without anyone knowing. One reason it is important to be able to track adoptions as best as possible is to show data on usage, success, retention, DWF, etc., which may assist with future grant funding. If you would be so willing to complete a short google form, the open community and I would appreciate it:
Data:
If anyone has data on success and retention with one of the Blueprint texts in comparison what you may have used before, I would love to see it.
A big thank you to everyone reading this for your support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and for many of you for trying out something new that may not have felt fully comfortable. All continued suggestions/recommendations/criticisms are appreciated and you if would like to be removed from the address list, please let me know.
With thanks and gratitude,
Dave
Below is the previous update from March '19:
Ancillary Update:
I think it important to convey that the intent with ancillaries is not a “one size fits all” model, and rather that the intent is to share templates and examples that may be useful but that the true hope is that instructors will create, adapt, innovate, and share back – each course is different and I believe the open community benefits from adaptions and sharing. An adaption of one of the texts or ancillary you create may be perfect for another instructor. I recognize hesitance to put your work out there, but highly encourage sharing.
I am excited to share that Jan Coville, at Granite State College in NH has created an adaption of the Career Decision Making OER text, and a team of faculty at Lansing Community College in MI are working on another adaption, creating a remix of the main text with other OER sources. Jan, would you be willing to share your adaption? (if so, I can place it in the shared google drive folder). Thanks!
PowerPoints:
Big thanks to Rocio Terry (counseling faculty/instructor using one of the Blueprint texts) for creating and sharing these slides for most of the chapters of the main text. Also thanks to Ashley Majoros (counseling faculty/instructor using one of the Blueprint texts) for adding the CC BY licenses. The google slides are in the “PowerPoints – Google Slides” folder in this google drive ancillary folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jkwHgNDRLeAmVCJdcwlF48eONBPdxzQ9
If you would like to adopt, edit, adapt, please make a copy of the slides. The folder permissions are view only, so it is hoped to encourage the “make your own copy to edit” practice.
(Google permissions and infrastructure is not my strong suit, so if you can’t do what you are trying to do, please let me know and we can best attempt to resolve).
The chapter numbers refer to the main text but many correlate to the Study Skills/Time Management and Career Decision Making smaller texts – you just need to correlate the chapters for the smaller texts.
PowerPoints are also available, but take up much more space so I’m going to see how google slides work out. If you have specific need for PowerPoint, please let me know.
Quiz Questions / Quiz Bank:
I set out to “free the quizzes” from Canvas over the winter break and miserably failed in this tech task. However, thanks to Heather Garcia, instructional designer at Oregon State University, these will be available by next week. She was able to use some third party software to extract them and they will soon be available in Word (easily available for editing), as well as exports to the main popular LMS formats. There have been some questions that have come up regarding access (how to try to prevent quizzes from being publicly available, in students hands, being sold, etc.). I’m still researching the best way to go for that. I am planning on sharing my Canvas course (targeting mid-April) so if you are a California Community College instructor or your college uses Canvas, you will have access to the course, but I believe the plan for sharing the quiz questions will be to send an e-mail request to me and I can verify the request is coming from an instructor and then send you the word docs and/or exports.
There are a few specifics about quiz questions that I will share with the requests (i.e. quiz instructions, design, a few units have more than one correct answers for questions, etc.).
I am thinking it may be best to specifically license the quizzes as CC BY NC SA (non-commercial, share alike), that would still allow for sharing and adaption but to try and prevent commercial use (I have heard Chegg has taken some quiz questions/banks found online and began selling them). Apurva and/or Alexis (or anyone else), would you have a recommendation for that?
Dave’s Assignments:
I will be sharing the assignments I use for the course I teach – that is on my list for April. Again, for folks on Canvas, you will be able to see these within the course shell as soon as that is available. For folks not on Canvas that may be interested, I will share these in the Google Drive ancillary folder.
Cultural Competency Draft Chapter:
The Cultural Competency chapter in collaboration with a global studies fellowship at Stanford University is in a very rough draft form and will be going through a peer review and student review process in April with the goal of this chapter being implemented into the main text in early May. Please note that this chapter is currently showing in the web version of the main text (for the purpose of the peer review but will not show in the exports). For anyone in the California bay area, I will be presenting on this chapter at a symposium at Stanford on May 18th and would be happy to have you in the audience if you may be interested:
I am very pleased that faculty authors Dr. Monica Burke and Dr. Ric Keaster at Western Kentucky University were willing to relicense their cultural competency module content from CC BY NC ND (non-commercial, no derivative to CC BY which will allow for their excellent content to be used in a remix).
Audio Project
The project to make the Blueprint text(s) chapters available as an audio version as started and we’re estimating completion likely somewhere in 2020. Special thanks to Dr. Lee Pierce at SUNY Geneseo who has volunteered to mentor and coach her Public Speaking students in recording readings of chapters. And thanks to Breanne Ahearn-Scott at Grossmont for her oversight with audio production. If you may be interested in learning more about this project, please see the thread at the Rebus Community here:
Course Outlines
Some of you have been asking great questions about official course outlines, articulation, curriculum approval, etc. I tend to suggest the importance of local processes, but also realize some of what we have done at Grossmont may help others. I have added Grossmont’s course outlines to the Google Drive ancillary folder.
(Please note that the course outlines for COUN 110 (Career Decision Making) and COUN 130 (Study Skills and Time Management) at Grossmont College are for one unit courses. The course outline for COUN 120 at Grossmont College is for a three unit College and Career Success course that satisfies the California State University Area E General Education requirement).
Join This Project
I encourage you to click on the Join This Project link to add yourself (if interested and if you have not done so already) to the group of instructors using one of the Blueprint OER texts. It will allow for group feedback and dialogue: https://projects.rebus.community/resource/qUdL9XRraZkRt7oaz2zFHi/adopt-or-adapt-the-blueprint-for-success-series
Tracking Adoptions
One of the challenges with OER is being able to track adoptions and adaptions. With no purchases or royalties, it is easy for adoptions to happen without anyone knowing. One reason it is important to be able to track adoptions as best as possible is to show data on usage, success, retention, DWF, etc., which may assist with future grant funding. If you would be so willing to complete a short google form, the open community and I would appreciate it:
Special thanks to Apurva Ashok and the teams at the Rebus Community and Pressbooks for their continued support! Also thanks to Colleen Sanders whose assistance with project management has helped the project continue to move forward. And congratulations to Colleen Sanders on a new full time librarian position at Skagit Valley College in Washington! Also congratulations to Marilyn Tajii (counseling faculty/instructor using one of the Blueprint texts) on a new full time counseling faculty position at Grossmont College!
Hello and welcome to faculty from Central Oregon Community College, Lansing Community College, College of the Sequoias, Sacramento City College, and Butte College!
It continues to be exciting to see this project grow and be shared in many places.
The Blueprint OER textbook project is very much a work in progress, but I am humbled to share that the main text recently won a textbook excellence award from the Textbook and Academic Author Association, the first CC BY attribution openly licensed textbook to do so (thanks to all of the original authors, reviewers, contributors, Rebus, and Pressbooks!):
TAA Blog: Abstract:
https://blog.taaonline.net/2019/02/taa-announces-2019-textbook-award-winners/
Press Release:
Judges’ Comments:
https://www.taaonline.net/2019-textbook-award-winners-media-kit
Some of you may be interested in reading the report of Sarah Goldman-Rab’s work and recent survey with the California Community Colleges:
https://www.ccleague.org/informational-briefing-california-community-college-realcollege-survey
(New Survey of California Community College Students Reveals More than Half Face Food Insecurity and Nearly 20 Percent Have Faced Homelessness).
Finally, it is still on my list to connect some of the folks who have expressed an interest in using an aspect of one of the texts at the high school level (hopefully April).
I am also planning on adding some information about AB 705 to the chapter regarding Assessment/Placement. I want to be thoughtful about this as I realize what is happening in California may not be happening elsewhere (or not at the same time), but it is important that our students understand the reasons for English and math assessments being replaced by other placement indicators and previous developmental courses no longer being offered and being replaced by transfer level support courses. I have a couple of leads on video content explaining this change to students and will be testing those with my students this semester.
A big thank you to everyone reading this for your support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and for many of you for trying out something new that may not have felt fully comfortable. All continued suggestions/recommendations/criticisms are appreciated and you if would like to be removed from the address list, please let me know.
With thanks and gratitude,
Dave
